You are seriously telling me that what made your female coworkers "deeply upset" was the idea that asking to be respected as women and not things like getting significantly less pay, sexual harassment and fewer career options? Either you are not telling the truth or this is the most ridiculous case of selective bias I've read on HN in a long time. Ask these female coworkers of yours what bothers them the most, the fight for gender equality in the workplace or getting paid less because they are women.

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As a woman you want respect because you are capable and smart. Not because you are a woman.

This is an really old and equally flawed argument that doesn't consider the fact that men discriminate women based on their gender not their individuality.

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In the course of my life I started to develop an higher and higher intolerance for topics like politically correctness and protection of minorities unless this was clearly put in general terms.

Political correctness is a weasel word designed to avoid meaningful discussions. By using it you've already made it clear that you have made up your mind on a topic that you're ignorant about.

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If you are an human being you need to be respected because you deserve respect like any other. I don't care if you are black, white, yellow or woman, you are an individual.

And yet you fail to see that individuals cannot fight centuries and millenia of stereotypes, biases and general ignorance.

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Similarly, I will not care who you are if you do something silly at work. Nothing is more offensive for you than me being too easy with you because you are part of some minority. This is, basically, a masked form of reverse-sexism, and is deeply offensive.

No one is asking you to subsidize minority stupidity, so I have no idea why you are bringing this up. Also, is this really a problem? People's work, regardless if they belong to a minority or not, are held to a certain standard and if they don't perform accordingly there are ways of remedying the problem.

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In general if there is a problem at the work place between individual A and B, I think it is always an error to talk about sexism, even when the root cause is some asshole not respecting you because you are a woman.

This is a very convenient way of avoiding to deal with sexism and other related issues. Imagine the guy who claims that he doesn't have issues with woman despite countless cases of harassing his female coworkers, that he just happens to have problem with individuals that always happen to be women.

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Trying to protect women in tech since they are women is like moving a cultural problem (the sexism) into an individual domain.

It's quite the opposite. You are so desperate to focus on individuals that you refuse to acknowledge that minority and gender issues can only be solved on higher level, i.e. group, company and society level. This is how we've managed to get things like equal political rights; centuries of organizing and fighting on higher social levels.

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A woman in tech has nothing less than a male in tech, as such does not need special care or protection. She needs to be respected as everybody else.

What does "less" mean? Woman are clearly more often harassed in the workplace, they get less pay, etc, so obviously something isn't working. I'm not sure that they need "special care" (nice pejorative term there) or protection by manly men, but they need to be treated equally and currently that's not the case.

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Another naive way to consider the problem is to think that sexism is a state of mind of men. Actually the problem is more complex than that, and a lot of women don't consider themselves or other women as capable as men.

You don't explain the complexity of the situation but you're implying that woman can be sexists too. Yes, that's obvious but doesn't change the fact that men are far more likely to be sexists and woman far more likely to be discriminated against.